Page 54 - the-thirty-nine-steps

improving his shooting. Altogether, a very clean, decent,
callow young man.
As we passed through a little town two policemen sig-
nalled us to stop, and flashed their lanterns on us.
‘Beg pardon, Sir Harry,’ said one. ‘We’ve got instructions
to look out for a car, and the description’s no unlike yours.’
‘Right-o,’ said my host, while I thanked Providence for
the devious ways I had been brought to safety. After that he
spoke no more, for his mind began to labour heavily with his
coming speech. His lips kept muttering, his eye wandered,
and I began to prepare myself for a second catastrophe. I
tried to think of something to say myself, but my mind was
dry as a stone. The next thing I knew we had drawn up out-
side a door in a street, and were being welcomed by some
noisy gentlemen with rosettes. The hall had about five hun-
dred in it, women mostly, a lot of bald heads, and a dozen or
two young men. The chairman, a weaselly minister with a
reddish nose, lamented Crumpleton’s absence, soliloquized
on his influenza, and gave me a certificate as a ‘trusted lead-
er of Australian thought’. There were two policemen at the
door, and I hoped they took note of that testimonial. Then
Sir Harry started.
I never heard anything like it. He didn’t begin to know
how to talk. He had about a bushel of notes from which he
read, and when he let go of them he fell into one prolonged
stutter. Every now and then he remembered a phrase he had
learned by heart, straightened his back, and gave it off like
Henry Irving, and the next moment he was bent double and
crooning over his papers. It was the most appalling rot, too.

54 The Thirty-Nine Steps